


The Tin Dog Blues

by Mad_Maudlin



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Action/Adventure, Crime, F/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-23
Updated: 2010-01-23
Packaged: 2017-10-06 14:59:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/54916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mad_Maudlin/pseuds/Mad_Maudlin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It turns out there is life after Doctor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Tin Dog Blues

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** Written for [](http://bringthehappy.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**bringthehappy**](http://bringthehappy.dreamwidth.org/), prompt: Mickey/Christina, blue. I believe that something blue does in fact appear in this story, even.

Tina is not like any girl Mickey's ever met. For starters, she doesn't want to be called _Tina._

"I'm a member of the peerage," she protests, more than once. "You should be calling me Lady Christina."

"I'll be calling you _idiot_ if you get us caught," is usually what he answers, because it always comes up at the worst possible times.

(Like the one with the handcuffs, when they weren't actually running from anything, but she rose up above him, flawless in the orange light that filtered through the windows, straddling his waist. "I think," she said then, "I would like you to call me 'my lady.'" And Mickey didn't usually go in for that sort of thing, but just the once, because she asked so nicely and because she'd hidden the key to the handcuffs.)

They are not criminals. ("Well, technically..." Tina starts to say. He kicks her.) They just do things sometimes that are not strictly legal. Torchwood are above the law, and UNIT are the law, and the Doctor can do a runner (oh, can he ever) and Sarah Jane sometimes puts them up for the night, but only if they're not currently wanted for anything and they leave all their weapons in a sack in the garden. She thinks Tina is a bad influence on Luke. Tina thinks she's a good influence on the family. Micky thinks Tina is a bad influence on everybody, but she calls him her better half, when she's not referring to him as Michael.

("That's not my name," he points out.

"It should be," she said. "It's so much more dignified."

Since he's not usually in a dignified position, he generally makes a rude gesture here.)

Because there are things UNIT and Torchwood can't do, and there are things that Sarah Jane and the Doctor won't do, and somewhere in the middle of all that there's Mickey and Tina. He accepts that she does it for kicks—that one day she might just decide to kick him—and she seems to accept that he has these pesky and illogical ethical boundaries that make everything seventeen times harder than it has to be. (Direct quote.) He builds her beautiful machines and she does beautiful things with them, beautiful things and terrible things and things that save the world.

Not that anybody notices. Not that anybody ever did. "I am accustomed to seeing that as a good thing," Tina points out.

"I'm just the tin dog," Mickey sighs.

He doesn't mind, mostly. He had his time in the sun in Pete's World, leading troops and defeating monsters and playing hop-frog with the boundaries of the universe, and Rose still chose the Doctor. Here he scavenges bits out of dumpsters and runs for his life and sends anonymous tips over the Internet, and when he bumped into Tina ("That's _Lady Christina!")_ she was trying to steal what he was trying to disarm, and after they'd dumped it in the Severn to muffle the explosion she asked for his number.

"What?" he said, because they were both covered in water and ash.

"You're cute and you're clever," she said, writing something on his palm. "And while you've apparently never heard of stealth, your arse looks good when you run. Call me sometime."

He asked "What?" again, while she walked away. (She looked good when she ran, too. She looks good all the time.)

So he called her, not for a date but for a bank job, only instead of stealing money they stole fourteen kilos of luminous moss and held it hostage to guarantee the good behavior of a blowfish. And then she called him, because her latest acquisition was undergoing mitosis, and they ended up on the couch together because the colony ate the bed. Then somehow they planned a train job together, and it wasn't like she actually asked to move in, he just woke up one afternoon and found her cleaning the fridge.

"Don't throw that out, that's self-aware," he warned her. "And I'm keeping the curries as a favor to a thing."

Because this is his life. Dumpsters and running and not-technically-crime and Christina. Tina.

Neither of them mentioned the Doctor for a long time, and when she finally let something slip about a flying bus he braced himself for it, for it to start all over again. "Was fun for a one-off," is what she actually said, with a shrug.

"He stole my girlfriend," Mickey said. That suddenly seemed important.

Tina's eyes went wide, and then she laughed, and then she was climbing in his lap again. "I trust I'm a suitable replacement?"

"Oh, yeah," he says, because nobody could ever replace Rose--_nobody_\--but Tina, she is something else entirely.

They look for work, or sometimes it finds them; there are aliens on Earth who fear UNIT and Torchwood, and Sarah Jane wouldn't let them in the house, but they're not a bad lot and Mickey's always willing to negotiate on compensation. (Once he got five lemon-flavored layer cakes as payment for fixing an interociter. Tina insisted on using him as her plate.) Between jobs they live on lottery tickets, and things Tina "finds," and unauthorized transfers from the private accounts of Europe's top 50 most overpaid businessmen. (She hung that article up on the wall; they cross them off as they go down the list.) If they go too long without a job then Tina gets jumpy, fidgety, asking questions about Macao and Rio like Mickey has a clue, "finding" the most unlikely things and then suddenly "losing" them again. One day she hides under the duvet with a radio scanner and won't come out until he brings her chips and pulls down the blackout curtains.

"You're too good for me, Michael," she says, leaning into his shoulder while she eats.

"That's not my name," he says, like always.

Only this time she wrinkles her nose and says, "I know that," and eats a chip.

It finally occurs to Mickey to ask, "Why d'you call me that, then?"

"Why do you call me Tina?"

He shrugs. "'Cause guys like me don't get to date women named Lady Christina."

She smiles softly. "And women of my status aren't supposed to date men named Mickey."

"So there we have it," he says. "The odd couple."

But she suddenly takes his hand and says, "You should be a Michael. Sir Michael of Powell."

"You saying I'm a knight in shining armor?" _Tin armor,_ he thinks, but you can put a shine on tin.

"You're my better half." She kisses his knuckles, and then his mouth, leaving traces of vinegar on his lips. "Sometimes I find that I need one."

"I didn't build you a flying bus," he says, because that suddenly seems important, too.

She blinks at him. "Where would we park it?"

She pulls him under the faded blue duvet, where the police are broadcasting her description, and by the sound of things they aren't going to be welcome at Sarah Jane's again for a _year,_ but Tina promises she put it back this time and Mickey sort of believes her. "My lady," he tests out, carding through her hair.

"My Mickey," she sighs.

(But until the next job, he works on the flying bus thing.)


End file.
